Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (56 page)

Introduction

i. Sucheng Chan, "Chinese American Entrepreneur: The California Career
of Chin Lung," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987 (San Francisco,
Chinese Historical Society of America), pp. 73-86; Ruthanne Lum McCunn,
Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories, 1828-1988 (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1988), pp. 88-97; Jew Law Ying, interview with author, September 7, 1982-, and January 14, 1987; Chin Lung, folder 12-017/38498, and
Leong Shee, folder 12017/37232, Chinese Departure Case Files, San Francisco
District Office, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 8 5, National Archives, San Bruno, Calif. (hereafter cited as CDCF-SFDO).

z. Law Ying Yung, interview with author, August 15, r 99z; Chin Mee Ngon,
folder 1938o/8-6, CDCF-SFDO.

3. Tom Yip Jing, interview with author, April 17, 1977, and November zo,
1986; Yung Hin Sen, folder 12017/51188, CDCF-SFDO. A "paper son" was
a person posing as the son of a merchant or U.S. citizen, two of the exempt
classes permitted entry to the United States during the Exclusion period
(1882-1943).

4. Jew Law Ying, interview with author, January 14, 1987.

5. Important race theories that ignore gender include Robert E. Park's race
relations cycle (see Race and Culture [New York: Free Press, 1950]); Robert
Blauner's internal colonialism model (see Racial Oppression in America [New
York: Harper & Row, 1972-]); and Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory
of racial formation (see Racial Formation in the United States from the 196os to
the 198os [New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986]). Important feminist theories that ignore race include Michelle Rosaldo's theory of private/public asymmetry (see "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in Woman,
Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19741, pp. 17-42-); and Heidi Hartmann's Marxist feminist model (see "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,"
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 3 [spring 1976]: 137-70).

6. See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1198r); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End
Press, 11984); and Bettina Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and
Class in American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1198z).

7. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Racial Ethnic Women's Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class Oppression," Review of Radical Political Economics 17, no. 3 (1985): 86-io8.

8. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History
and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. Z (1992): 2511-73; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 119911); Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton
Dill, eds., Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1994); Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural
Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gloria Anzal-
dua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 11990); and
Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994).

9. See Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic
Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966).

to. In choosing to use the theme of footbinding to frame my study, I do
not mean to lend support to the Orientalist obsession with the "victim script"
of bound feet, which, as China scholars like Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann rightfully point out, have for too long dominated research on gender relations in Chinese history. Recent research on Chinese women writers and women's work in
the household economy before the modern era show all too well that a significant number of women, far from being oppressed victims, did not allow their
bound feet to silence their voices or hinder their productive labor. See Dorothy
Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, "Learned
Women in the Eighteenth Century," in Engendering China: Women, Culture,
and the State, ed. Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Christina Gilmartin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. z7-46; and Li Yu-ning, "Historical Roots of Changes in Women's Status in Modern China," in Chinese
Women Through Chinese Eyes, ed. Li Yu-ning (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,
11992), pp. ioz-zz.

11. For examples of immigration studies that refute the modernization theory that premodern immigrants to America eventually all abandon Old World
traditions for new ways, see John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);
and Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in
New York City, 1900-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199z).

i z. Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1950).

i. Bound Feet

i. Leong Shee, folder 12017/37232, CDCF-SFDO. According to the immigration file, Leong Shee claimed that she had married Chong Sung in 1885,
yet she was seeking admission as the wife of Chin Lung. Immigration officials
most likely did not question the discrepancy in her testimony because of her apparent upper-class background: she had bound feet.

z. Jew Law Ying, interview with author, January 14, 1987.

3. For a discussion of Chinese immigration in the context of modern world
capitalism, see June Mei, "Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong
to California, 1850 to 1882," in Labor Migration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng Hirata and Edna
Bonacich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), PP.
219-47; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California,
186o-191o (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986),
chap. i ("The Chinese Diaspora"); and idem, "European and Asian Immigration into the United States in Comparative Perspective, 18zos to 19zos," in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-
McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), PP. 37-75.

4. Sing-wu Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 1848-1888 (San
Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1978), pp. 8-9.

5. See Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, pp. 7-31. For a further discussion of the
conditions in the Guangdong Province that led to emigration overseas, see Zo
Kil Young, "Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-188o" (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, 1971); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the
Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).

6. The tendency in the past has been for immigration historians to view Chinese as "sojourners" and Europeans as "immigrants," the implication being that
the Chinese, unlike Europeans, did not intend to stay but remained unassimilated and apart from mainstream American society; hence it was justifiable to
bar their further immigration and exclude them from American social and political life. Recent scholarship, however, using return migration rates and written sentiments of immigrants, has demonstrated that many Europeans-such as
Greeks, Italians, Poles, Danes, Germans, and Slovaks-shared this sojourner attitude. See Franklin Ng, "The Sojourner, Return Migration, and Immigration
History," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987, PP. 53-71; and Chan,
"European and Asian Immigration," pp. 38-39.

7. Charles Caldwell Dobie, San Francisco's Chinatown (New York: D.
Appleton-Century Company, 1936), p. 41.

8. My calculations are based on statistics given in Mary Roberts Coolidge,
Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 19o9), pp. 50Z, 498.

9. Lai Chun-chuen, Remarks of the Chinese Merchants of San Francisco upon
Governor John Bigler'sMessage and Some Common Objectives, with Some Explanations of the Character of the Chinese Companies and the Laboring Class in California (San Francisco: Office of the Oriental, Whitton, Town & Co., 1855), P. 3.

1o. New scholarship on women's prescribed roles in traditional China has thrown into question whether these precepts do not more readily reflect the idealized social order rather than the reality of women's lives. Daughters of the
gentry class were often educated by private tutors and some were thus able to
distinguish themselves in the literary world. As Dorothy Ko's study of women
writers in the late imperial period shows, for this group of literate women talent and virtue were compatible and, in fact, mutually reinforcing. It was precisely because women's literary talents gave them visibility and a powerful new
voice that maxims such as "absence of talent in a woman is a virtue" gained popularity. See Ko, "Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture
in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China," Late Imperial China 13, no.
i (June 1992): 9-39; and Li Yu-ning, "Historical Roots of Changes."

i i. See Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in
China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), chap. 1; and Elizabeth
Croll, Familism and Socialism in China (New York: Schocken Books, 1980),
chap. z.

iz. Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China, p. 17; Arthur Smith, Village
Life in China: A Study in Sociology (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899), pp.
275-76; Daniel Harrison Kulp, Country Life in South China: The Sociology of
Familism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), pp. 89-90, 252;
Holmes Beckwith, "The Chinese Family, with Special Relation to Industry"
(Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1909), pp. 103-5; and Rubie S. Watson, "Girls' Houses and Working Women: Expressive Culture in the
Pearl River Delta, 1900-1941," in Jaschok and Miers, eds., Women and Chinese
Patriarchy, pp. z5-29.

13. See Marjorie Topley, "Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung," in
Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 67-88; Andrea Patrice Sankar, "The Evolution of the Sisterhood in Traditional Chinese Society: From Village Girls' Houses
to Chai T'angs in Hong Kong" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1978);
Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic
Strategies in South China, 1860-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989); and Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs
of the Far East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 ).

14. See Ludwig J. Young, "The Emancipation of Women in China Before
19zo, with Special Reference to Kwangtung" (Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1965).

15. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 1-16.

16. Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San
Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1987), P. 46.